Editor's note: Elaine Pagels, who canceled her Nov. 11 appearance in Dallas because of illness, will speak 2:30 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 6 at a sold-out Arts & Letters Live event. This story was originally posted on Nov. 1.

In April 1987, Elaine Pagels' 6-year-old son, Mark, died from pulmonary hypertension, an illness that had shadowed most of his short life. The following year her husband, Heinz Pagels, a noted physicist, perished in a climbing accident.

Such tragedies would challenge anyone's faith in religion, in life itself. In the case of Pagels, one of America's leading scholars of religion and the author of groundbreaking works such as The Gnostic Gospels; Adam, Eve and the Serpent; and Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas, her grief drove her to probe even deeper into humanity's long struggle to understand its place in the cosmos. Now, in this autobiographical work, Pagels, 75, looks back on a rich life of learning, writing, loving, seeking truth and, inevitably, suffering.

Elaine Pagels

(Barbara Conviser/Ecco)

Pagels, born Elaine Hiesey, had her first brush with organized religion as a teenager when she fell under the spell of evangelist Billy Graham at a rally in San Francisco. Her born-again conversion, which she thought promised "a new and expansive universe," baffled and angered her secular parents, who thought religion "as obsolete as an outgrown bicycle stashed in a back closet."

In her late teens, however, Pagels' faith withered. After a Jewish friend was killed in a car wreck and some of her "Christian" friends declared him bound for hell, she quit her church and never returned. (An older friend of Pagels, a musician named Jerry Garcia, survived the accident; a few years later, he named his band the Grateful Dead.)

So Pagels' orthodox faith in mainstream religion died. By 22, having earned bachelor's and master's degrees from Stanford, she was asking, "Why hadn't religion died out by now? Hadn't Nietzsche pronounced God dead a century ago?" Indeed he had, but Pagels' unquenchable curiosity kept her on a spiritual quest.

Entering Harvard to pursue a doctorate in religion, she fell into what would be her life's work when an adviser introduced her to the "secret gospels" — those non-Biblical, "heretical" texts that had been discovered in the Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi in 1945. This was Pagels' first encounter with Gnosticism, a belief that mystical knowledge comes from direct experience with the divine unmediated by the formal hierarchy of Christianity or Judaism.

The resulting research led to her best-selling book The Gnostic Gospels (1979), which won the National Book Award and launched her reputation.

Why Religion? , by Elaine Pagels.

(Ecco)

While most of Why Religion? extends an open hand to believers and nonbelievers alike, stressing our vulnerability to fate and our need to make sense of a chaotic world, occasional passages may baffle some readers. After quoting from the Gospel of Thomas, which allegedly contains "the secret words of the living Jesus," Pagels writes: "We're not asked to believe this; it just happens to be true." Not all readers may share her certainty.

In the end, though, Why Religion? is not so much an argument to be defended as it is the heartfelt confession of a survivor. Most of the time Pagels writes as one of us, never pretending that her vast learning provides armor against suffering. As a mother and a widowed wife, she renders achingly beautiful portraits of her lost loved ones. Many of these passages — as when little Mark tells her, "I will love you all my life and all my death" — cannot be read dry-eyed.

"I had to look into that darkness, since I could not continue to live fully while refusing to recall what happened, realizing that no one escapes terrible losses," Pagels writes.

Readers of all faiths and none can learn from her brilliance and courage.

Why Religion?

A Personal Story

Elaine Pagels

(Ecco, $27.99)

Details

Elaine Pagels (who was originally scheduled to speak Nov. 11) will now appear at 2:30 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 6, as part of Arts & Letters Live at the Dallas Museum of Art, 1717 N. Harwood St. The event is sold out, and no overflow seating was planned. Details at DMA.org/ALL.

CORRECTION, 9:52 a.m. Jan. 4, 2019:The details box of the revised version of this story, which was posted Nov. 11, gave the incorrect date for Elaine Pagels' rescheduled appearance. It is Jan. 6, not Nov. 6.